Climate denial is passé.
Especially in Tennessee and Hamilton County where the denial that our state and county elected officials seem to really excel at is revenue vs. need.
Several members of Hamilton County's state legislative delegation defended their 'just-say-no' votes and stances on everything from Insure Tennessee to fully funding education to future consideration of gas taxes and sales tax reform.
Their standard answers during a two-hour discussion Tuesday with the Times Free Press involving Sens. Bo Watson and Todd Gardenhire, along with Reps. Gerald McCormick, Patsy Hazlewood and JoAnne Favors, was best summed up by Rep. Watson:
"Everyone seems to want to make this a revenue problem. It's not. Growing our economy should add revenue [rather than raising taxes]," said Watson, adding that the state's budget is currently based on a 3.7 percent increase in revenue from one of the best state economy-growth periods in years.
Patsy Hazlewood
JoAnne Favors"But cost is outstripping" that revenue, he said. Primarily thanks or no thanks to health care costs.
It's plain. Dollars and cents denial.
Watson and Gardenhire voted in committee to kill Insure Tennessee -- Gov. Bill Haslam's negotiated Tennessee version of the Affordable Care Act -- you know, Obamacare, that would have paid for all of the costs of Tennessee's expansion of Medicaid for two years and 90 percent or less of the costs thereafter to give health insurance the state's 280,000 working poor who make too much to receive TennCare but still aren't offered workplace insurance and can't afford to buy separate commercial insurance.
Their excuse? Because of you folks out in readerland who "don't understand" Insure Tennessee and because we "can't trust the federal government." Denial. It's important to note here that McCormick carried the Insure Tennessee bill for Gov. Haslam and still believes the state should have taken the federal government's guaranteed $22.5 billion. Hazlewood and Favors -- like the rest of the General Assembly -- didn't get an opportunity to vote on the measure because it was killed in committee.
What about education? This is where Hamilton County leaders join the league of deniers, but first -- our state lawmakers:
Gardenhire wants to hold schools accountable for students who graduate high school but aren't college ready. If they go to college and have to pay for remedial classes, he wants the school system they graduated from to have to pay for those college remedial classes. Frankly, that's a fine idea, except that part of the reason the kids are not college ready is because we haven't fully funded education (through the Better Education Program or BEP) even to the level the state has already said was necessary. And McCormick and Watson maintain that some counties, including Hamilton, that have sued the state to get that full funding are "really just suing taxpayers."
"If they are successful, it will destroy the state budget," Watson said.
Meanwhile, in the Hamilton County Courthouse, Mayor Jim Coppinger is awaiting word from the county Board of Education after he asked the board for "a school budget with no increased revenue."
"We're not going to raise property taxes," Coppinger said. "I've always said time and time again, it would only be a last resort to raise property taxes."
This after Hamilton County Schools Superintendent Rick Smith toured the county with 11 public meetings making a case to add art and foreign language instruction in elementary grades and giving teachers a 5 percent pay increase. Smith noted this could be done with a 40-cent property tax increase that would add about $150 a year in taxes on the county's average $150,000 home.
Employers are begging local leaders to improve education in Hamilton County -- those same employers, by the way, who bring and keep jobs in Tennessee to grow the economy that Watson says should fuel revenue, rather than taxes.
Yes, folks. What we have here are so-called leaders of the state and county stripe engaging in revenue, taxes and need denial. So much so, that they don't even want to say the word "tax."
Instead, their message is this: We don't have a revenue problem. Our problem is you people -- you keep coming up with needs, and you need too much.